Unintuitve Moodle

[secretlife]

Sometimes it's useful to make up a pupil (student) login and then you can test stuff out with them , like enrolling on courses, doing quizzes and seeing how scores are recorded in the gradebook etc.

[SimpleSi]

@andy

 

created a test user - then worked out that I needed to go to the course itself and add that user as a student - all works OK.

 

Onwards and upwards

 

regards

 

Simon

[mighty.grey.eagle]

There are several issues throughout this thread and some of them need clarifying.

 

a) there is a problem with defining roles. These came in with 1.7 and many Moodle users stopped upgrading from 1.6 because of that. However they are very powerful in the way you can over-ride the roles. For instance we have teaching staff who obviously teachers in their own course but students if they just want to "observe". I over-ride the normal student role in some of the forums so they can "rate" a comment.

 

b) the "look" of Moodle can be off-putting. Much of this is due to the fact that it is not a conventional web-site and so you cannot just put your information anywhere. There are fantastic themes available if you look. For example here or here. On both of these sites you can flick between the different themes.

 

c) CLEO try to take away much of the grief associated with learning Moodle - which is why they put on free courses. They also tie the schools down so that they don't install blocks that might cause compatibility problems. This is fine for most schools but, I suppose, we like to live on the edge. It does cause problems. For instance one of the blocks we added trashed our 1.8 theme. It means you have to start again.

 

The important thing is that Moodle (or something like it) does change the way that teachers teach and students learn. Persevere - it is worth it.

 

@SimpleSi

 

If you want to wander into Carr Hill sometime we can show you what we do. When I say "we" I really mean Geoff and the others - I just tell them what to do. Sometimes they listen.

 

I also suggest you change your theme to Chameleon and have a play. When you are happy pass the changes back to CLEO to add to your site themes.

[poltawski]

Hi All, please excuse this brief thread take-over. As a point of discolsure i'm a developer at LUNS ltd and responsible for the CLEO Moodle Service, hope you don't mind me responding:

 

@simplesi

Please please please! tell CLEO what is unintuitive! I am a Moodle Developer and I also work for CLEO, and I really want to help with making things better!

 

If you find a problem, report it! Either via the moodle tracker or via CLEO, or perhaps even informally via the CLEO moodle (vle.cleo.net.uk).

 

Hopefully things will eventually improve with good suggestions, its certainly a focus of new moodle versions. But it wont happen overnight.

 

With regards to themes, you can have as much customisation as you'd like, we (CLEO) do not restrict you, other than ensuring your themes are valid and sustainable. (e.g. we disallow if themes are doing database queries.. which isn't something a theme should be doing as its not style!)

I hope nobody tells you otherwise, you do have as much control as you'd like about theme and that was the aim from the start.

 

@dezt

 

We (CLEO) try to not restrict anything unnecessarily. To date we've only ever disabled one feature in moodle core, that is Moodle Networking. The reason for this was because we didn't wish schools to use this without not know what they were doing and our support orgs not understanding either. You can request this to be enabled by contacting your local support org (although we'd prefer you'd know what you are doing).

 

Custom modules are a major problem as we need to ensure they work across all 450+ moodles we currently host. This does mean we need to make sacrifices. If we enable a module it needs to working more or less 'forever'! As MGE suggests, this can cause problems if the module is not perfect. We make the sacrifice of the latest new module in return for reliability in CLEO.

 

@secretlife

CLEO is not on holiday and available all through the holiday period! From what I can see that moodle looks to be working OK to me at the

moment.

 

Please report all issues imediately to your local support centre

we are interested in providing 24/7 access. Issues *will* be looked at,

but often issues are not reported. Please make sure you report

problems! (But please also note there are lots of other issues which may

cause your moodle unavailable (e.g. my isp is currently ridiculously slow)!).

 

@mighty.grey.eagle

Deary me, I took Christmas Day off, you should too

 

All CLEO moodles are now using 1.8

 

For the (off the) record, I hope we will be looking at moving to 1.9

at the easter holidays. There is still a significant amount of work going

into 1.9 bugfixing, and i'm trying to get as involved in this as I can to ensure a

smooth upgrade path for CLEO schools. (For example, recently there was a big change in the admin tree to include all admin pages in search and other such things. I have been trying to test these things thoroughly MDL-11561 )

[secretlife]

Hi there Poltaswki! Nice to locate a real CLEO person! We are mainly happy with CLEO I have to say but despite your reassurance there have been real problems accessing our Moodle in the last week or so - sometimes it just takes forever to load, then times out -sometimes you can get the front page but nothing else; sometimes I can get as far as logging in and it won't let me edit - sometimes it lets me go to edit but I can't upload anything. In fact, I have only managed to get on it to alter the front page a couple of times since we broke up and even then I had to upload images and resources to one of my own sites instead,and link to them..so there IS a problem, albeit spasmodically. I have been checking it every hour or so for over a week - yes, I know, I'm sad! (I've been told to keep a log of issues over the holiday)

[SimpleSi]

I also suggest you change your theme to Chameleon and have a play. When you are happy pass the changes back to CLEO to add to your site themes.

 

 

I hope nobody tells you otherwise, you do have as much control as you'd like about theme and that was the aim from the start.

 

 

Your telling me to play with the themes ...WHERE?????????????????????

 

AFAICS I can use the ones supplied and thats it!!!!!

 

And I've looked!!!! - Honest :oops:

 

Where is the ability to change a theme hidden???????

 

regards

 

Simon

[secretlife]

Apparently with Chameleon once you load it up if you shift-click on the page you can edit then save your changes - have alook here:

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Chameleon#How_does_Chameleon_change_its_colours.3F

[CyberNerd]

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Themes

 

Site themes

 

Site themes may be previewed and chosen via Administration >> Configuration >> Themes.

[mighty.grey.eagle]

@SimpleSi

 

I see that you have found the chameleon theme - but I can't seem to change any of the CSS. No shift/click. Do you have the same problem?

 

Perhaps Dan P can tell us if CLEO have set

 

$THEME->chameleonenabled = false;

 

in config.php.

 

I have checked that Ajax is enabled globally (and in my profile) so I am running out of ideas. No difference in IE7 and Firefox.

[SimpleSi]

I see that you have found the chameleon theme - but I can't seem to change any of the CSS. No shift/click. Do you have the same problem?

 

Same here.

 

regards

 

Simon

[poltawski]

Perhaps Dan P can tell us if CLEO have set

 

$THEME->chameleonenabled = false;

Nope, but we do use an unusual theme setup.

 

I have a feeling it might be to do with incorrect theme variables, (which I fixed in CVS last week, amazingly!). I am going out now but will have a look later.